Ground-breaking Marine standards development projects led by Social Change Online

SCO's Rob Atkinson is working on two key standards development projects for sharing data for the marine sector:

The first project is a pilot for the design and development of a Marine Cadastre infrastructure for Australia. This involves the development and implementation of common data models for sharing and maintaining information about rights and responsibilities in Australia's marine environment.

This project was described by one Qld Govt official as a generational opportunity to develop a land-based tenure system for our coastal waters.

The other project, MarineXML, is an international, European Community funded project to develop a "framework for standardizing XML implementations of marine-related data exchange".

The UK office of the World Wide Web Consortium (CLRC Rutherford Labs) has been engaged as a project partner to assist in the creation of a standard template for international collaboration in XML standards.

Other partners include major European marine operational agencies, the UK Marine Information Council and the European office of the Global Oceans Observing System.

The Consortium is currently developing a process to include interested parties and agendas from around the world, including the US Coastguard and Australia's Marine Cadastre project.

The MarineXML Consortium has been created to improve interoperability of marine data management. Currently there are large numbers of initiatives using XML, and these tend to be isolated and incompatible with each other.

The MarineXML initiative will address the problem by providing an organizational framework and modular "architecture" to allow common standards to be developed. This framework will not be a rigid definition of terms, but rather a flexible means of sharing common terms and XML constructs between projects through use of the W3C standard OWL (Web Ontology Language).

MarineXML will also act as a liaison and establish usage conventions for referencing related "domains", such a land management, science, climate.

Social Change Online is a foundation consortium member, and SCO's Rob Atkinson is leading the MarineXML technical strategy and architecture development. Social Change Online has engaged Simon Cox from CSIRO (editor of the OpenGIS GML specification) to assist in matching emerging requirements with relevant OpenGIS XML standards.

Rob Atkinson said:

"One tremendously important outcome of the MarineXML project will be an analysis of the current standards and implementation baseline. This analysis will be maintained and published as a web-accessible database that will help inform all future standards efforts in the field. In this way, MarineXML will be a framework to help other efforts avoid re-inventing the wheel, or creating half-baked enterprise solutions that will not be useful to external stakeholders."

The project strategy includes a consultation to develop a system model to ensure all stakeholders requirements are identified, a logical model and a pilot implementation using both existing OpenGIS interfaces and existing data management facilities.

The project is undertaken under the auspices of the Australian National Marine Data Management Group, led by Qld Department of Natural Resources and Mines, steered by the National Oceans Office, ANZLIC, Geosciences Australia (National Mapping Division) and the Great Barrier Marine Park Authority.

Rob Atkinson explained how Social Change Online's expertise enables a solution to this long-standing challenge:

"The community needs a practical solution that will provide a robust, maintainable platform for future requirements. We have considerable experience in developing and implementing open standards to allow such systems to be created.

In this project we are focused on matching the ongoing business requirements of many stakeholders with the information model.

We will be leveraging the organizational governance approach from the MarineXML project to allow the stakeholders to define and extend a core data model, yet for the first time realize the potential benefits of a common approach."

MarineXML: http://marinexml.net
Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure: http://asdi.org.au
OpenGIS Consortium: http://opengis.org